Thai Learners’ Acquisition of English Dative Constructions: Evidence for the Absence of L1 Transfer
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This study investigated Thai EFL learners’ acquisition of English dative constructions, i.e., Prepositional Dative (PD) and Double Object (DO) constructions employing Radford’s (2004) Minimalist accounts as a framework and Acceptability Judgment as a task. Two hypotheses were formulated. Firstly, the English PD would be accepted more readily than the English DO, due to the availability of PDs in both languages and the absence of DOs, by English standards, in Thai. Secondly, if there was L1 transfer, English counterparts of Thai DO and Thai Serial Verb constructions (SVC) would be initially accepted at a greater rate than English DOs. At later stages, given access to UG and adequate L2 input, the English DO would be accepted more significantly than the Thai DO and Thai SVC. Participants consisted of three groups of Thai EFL learners (beginning, intermediate, and upper intermediate). Results largely confirm both hypotheses. Particularly, Thai DOs and SVCs were rejected substantially from the intermediate learners onwards. This shows that the initial transfer of Thai DO and SVCs did not occur. Therefore, this study does not support Full Transfer at the initial stage (contra Schwartz & Sprouse, 1996). This study suggests L2 learners’ indecision on the target L2 structure at the early stage and progress to attainment at later stages, in line with Wakabayashi’s Lexical Learning and Lexical Transfer hypothesis (2009), and accessibility to UG at large.
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